Healthcare users' evaluation of general practice - a survey among Danish men aged 45 to 70 years.

Abstract

Background: Knowledge about healthcare users' evaluation of general practice is relatively limited.

Aim: We aimed to investigate evaluations in Danish men of general practice healthcare and of different aspects of general practitioners' (GPs) communication with patients.

Design & setting: Secondary analyses of data from a web-based survey in 6756 Danish men aged 45-70 years (30% response rate) using municipality-level information from registries, self-reported sociodemographic data, personality characteristics, and five-point Likert scale evaluations of healthcare and communication in general practice.

Results: A large majority of participants agreed (n=4420, 65%) or strongly agreed (n=1653, 24%) that their GP treatment had been "almost perfect", with slightly fewer (n=4205, 63%) responding that their GP was good at showing consideration for them. The latter item was, however, reversed, making comparisons more difficult and all differences were small. Older healthcare users evaluated healthcare higher (P<0.01) and higher scores on the extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness personality dimensions generally were associated with higher evaluation scores (P<0.01) while the opposite tended to be true for respondents with higher neuroticism scores (P=0.002). When not controlling for multiplicity, participants in rural area tended to evaluate the explanation of medical procedures with lower scores (P=0.014) and participants with cerebrovascular disease (P=0.003) and those residing in higher tax income area (P=0.001) tended to generally evaluate GP care less positively.

Conclusion: Despite an overall high evaluation of GP care, evaluations may vary, including among different groups of healthcare users.